Just when we think Congress: The Board Game is pretty balanced, we find there's still more we can do. While we'd like to not get stuck in the trap of endlessly editing and never finishing, we are not comfortable trying to print something that isn't our best work. Not only that, but it will be a long time before printing is viable, and so it's in our best interest to fix problems now.

We've been sitting down this week to redesign every single bill, rider, and action, as well as re-balance some state and senator abilities to make sure that no particular element of the game was favored in the mechanics. Speaking of which, there are some slight tweaks to those mechanics, but for the most part the actual rules and the art are fine. We're nearly finished rebalancing, and once that's done we'll get some more sets printed to try them out.

A big change in the cards is in reducing the overall number of them. Congress: The Board Game has about 211 cards in its current iteration. We've known from the beginning it's a card-heavy game, but we've also found some of those cards are not actively helping make the game more interesting or fun. We can easily reduce the number of cards without really sacrificing any of our best ideas, not to mention it will significantly reduce printing costs (cards right now are projected to be 50+ percent). Our goal is to whittle this down to 180 cards - still a lot, but without the extra fluff that just got in the way and made the game more intimidating to set up.